Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Baiting started

From:Keith Mcgill <kmcgill@mtlebanon.org>
To:egillen476 <egillen476@aol.com>
Subject:Re: Baiting
Date:Tue, Feb 7, 2017 11:55 am

Good morning Elaine,
Baiting has started. It started sometime after January 29th. I do not have an exact date.
Keith

On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 10:03 AM, egillen476@aol.com <egillen476@aol.com> wrote:
Hi Keith,

Has the baiting started yet? 
If so, when did it start?
If not, any idea when it will start?

Thanks.

Elaine 

--
Keith McGill, AICP
Municipal Manager
412-343-3684

*************

 The contract between MTL and White Buffalo states that WB needs three weeks of baiting. Assuming (and you know what happens when you assume) the baiting started on January 30. Three weeks of baiting takes us to February 20. 






Team DeNicola is being paid for 10 hours per day but look at the hours they can actually work per day:

7 hours per day on private property (4 PM - 11 PM)and 5 hours per day on public property (6 PM - 11 PM). Where else but Mt. Lebanon can you work for five hours and be paid for ten, especially at $95 and $110 per hour? I know that Susan Morgans approves 15 minute work days. Maybe she is the brains behind this.

The sad part is, that once the baiting period is over and they do start shooting, they are only required to stay here for 12 days and there is no minimum on the number of deer they are to remove, just a maximum of 100. Think about this…why would you put a maximum number of 100 if you didn’t think up front that there weren’t that many deer left to remove?

That’s close to $7000 per day to remove just a few deer. This deal was poorly negotiated by our elected officials.

Talk about being fiscally irresponsible, here is the December Expenditure report
  • $707.62 to feed our commissioners before the meetings in December. 
  • a 30% deposit of $588 for the Municipal Holiday Party
  • Printing for the magazine was $14,025
  • Magazine Manager software and set-up $493.00
  • $800 for stock photography from Getty Images. Did we come to the conclusion that the cells phones take excellent photos? Or do we have to buy stock photography because we have stealth deer?
  • 2 one way flights for our firemen, who put their lives on the line for us, cost $30.45. 
This is a disgrace.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Couldn't get an exact date? Did he think about asking the baiters? Or does Keith not even know who they are! This is getting out of hand. I really hope these baiters know what they are doing.

Anonymous said...

Maybe this is a stupid question, or it has been asked and answered earlier; i.e. I haven't follow events closely.

I remember hearing that DeNicola said that Mt. Lebanon's sponsored bow hunting program wasn't finding as many deer to kill this year as last, and was maybe running at 50% (?) of deer killed from last year. However, no one from the KNOW-NOTHING commission asked for a killing report from the bow hunting program as input before deciding to spend $100,000.00 of taxpayers money for another dangerous bait-and-shoot deer killing program. Can anyone explain why the commission didn't want to know how many deer were killed in their bow hunting program before spending $100,000.00 for another shooting program? This seems like critically important information that was available and a fiduciary responsibility, before deciding to spend another $100,000.00 of taxpayers money, and putting citizens at risk of lethal harm again. I believe the commission said something like the bow hunting report wasn't due to be presented until some time in February (don't remember which meeting), but that's ridiculous; i.e. they could get the results at any time by just calling or emailing DeNicola. How could they make an informed decision to move forward with another bait-and-shoot program w/o knowing the results of the bow hunting program? This just seems like intentional ignorance and totally irresponsibility. I just don't understand the reasoning or logic behind this behavior. However, maybe I'm just missing something.

In addition, couldn't any one of the commissioners, who I think are equal in authority, requested the bow hunting deer killing information and made that info available to the taxpayers of Mt. Lebanon?

Again, I apologize if these questions have been asked and answered before. If so, please just ignore this post.

Lebo Citizens said...

These questions have been asked many times, but there is no need to apologize because they are never answered. Commissioners will learn how many deer were killed by archers at the Feb. 14 commission meeting one fourth of the way into the "sharpshooting" program. Just part of the frequently unanswered questions.
Elaine

Anonymous said...

What makes this whole deer issue so absurd are compilation the facts over the year.
The municipality spent a good deal of money conducting two aerial surveys which were supposed to be the most accurate means of counting the deer population. The second survey found fewer deer than the first.
So they conducted a corral and shoot which yielded if memory serves 6 deer.
We then had archers and shooters, one was terminated early because they couldn't find deer and after archers and shooters the deer accident rate went up instead of reducing accidents.

Now we've ended an $8,000+ archery hunt, and the manager and commissioners without knowing the results of that hunt have launched into an $85,000 shooting cull.

These brilliant leaders that saw evidence that their efforts to reduce accidents were failing, have no idea (so they claim) where culling is happening on private property are clueless to whether the latest archers took any deer or not.

Could it possibly be that with all the baiting we are actually attracting deer (deer can easily range 2 miles foraging for food) into Mt. Lebanon?

Could it be that taxpayers are footing the bill for deer pest control for a very small and select group of private land owners?

Anonymous said...

How many MTL residents can say they (or their employer) bill $95 to $110/ hour?

What makes the rate even more absurd is that their are probably a million PA residents that do the same activity for the sport and pay the Game Commission good money for doing so.

Here's an idea! Why don't we pay these sharpshooters a bounty rather than an hourly rate.
They bag a deer they then call PW or some other official to log where it was taken and the ear gets tagged (to prevent them from moving the carcus to another location).

This way we get an accurate survey of where the deer are or where they're coming from and formulate better ways to deal with them!
Hey, it has to be a better plan than what we've been doing--- the accident rate went up remember!